As accurate as these articles have been I believe the impact of right wing media is only part of the story. Another factor is how susceptible some people of a certain generation are to having their fears and anxieties preyed upon and played upon by these media opportunists. The world they see around them now is far different in many ways than the one they grew up in, the one they expected to inhabit as they raised families and reached retirement.
As examples I can think of a number of incidents from my own life.
First let's level set. I am a baby boomer. Too young to have come of age in the raucous 1960's, but the times of the late 60's and early 1970's certainly shaped my world and my expectations. Let's just say I am within ten years of what traditionally had been considered retirement age. So I'm younger than many of the parents and grandparents who have been the subject of these "lost to Fox News" pieces. But even for people of my age group the country is vastly different than the one we internalized in our youth. Is it any wonder then that some people of my age could be seen crying and raging at Tea Party events in recent years that they "wanted their country back"?
The first example of how the world has changed since my youth occurred in high school, specifically American History class my junior year of high school. The teacher said he had a question for just the guys in the class. What if we boarded an airplane and when the pilot's voice came on over the intercom to tell us about our flight, time of departure, etc that it was a female's voice? What would be our reaction?
Maybe my class was a fairly progressive, forward thinking one even though political discussions of any kind were rare among classmates at that time. Every boy who spoke up, including me, thought the question was ridiculous on its face. No commercial airline would put anyone in that position unless they had gone through proper training and were properly certified, it would be too risky for the airline to do otherwise. So you would have to assume this was a qualified pilot, female or not.
"That's interesting", our teacher smiled. "The guys in the class before you were almost unanimous in saying they would get up and leave the plane." Remembering back to high school days it is possible that some alpha male in the other class spoke up first with that opinion and everyone else followed. But even so the point is that it really wasn't that long ago that the question of a female pilot was something curious enough to be considered worthy of serious thought and debate.
Fast forward to recent years for another example of how today's world has diverged so much from that of my youth. I work at a large corporation in the Information Technology department. At one point, a few years ago, I was part of a small team that worked very closely together for a few months on a very fast-paced intense project. The project methodology called for daily team meetings.
One day as we sat huddled in a small conference room it struck me that this would not have been the project team I would have visualized being a member of in my youth. I looked around the table and saw a man born in Pakistan, another originally from Indonesia, a young woman from South Korea and a young man from India, and me, a middle-aged white male born in the USA. Except for the Indian all of these people were employees living in the area where the office is located. This was definitely not my father's work place.
People react to change in different ways. I noted the makeup of the team and just thought "wow how different from years ago".But I did not find it threatening or unsettling. Rather it struck me as kind of "cool" and an indication that times certainly have changed. But not everyone would look at it that way. What I have described were easily visible ways the country has changed during my lifetime. But there have been deeper currents as well that have led to changes perhaps less visible, but truly disruptive.
The middle class in America has been rocked and squeezed for many decades now. Free trade and globalization have moved high-paying jobs overseas, jobs that used to sustain a large part of the American middle class. Changes to tax and fiscal policy have funneled more and more money into fewer and fewer hands, weakening demand in the economy and putting a downward pressure on job growth. At the same time government policy and globalization pressures have lessened the influence of unions and simultaneously made it easier for companies to exploit workers and to get more work out of them for less money.
The result is a generation of people who either remember how their own families were provided for, or can remember providing for their own families in a much less stressful environment. Wages and salaries have stagnated while worker productivity has doubled. Job security is a thing of the past. Even if you're doing a good job and your company is profitable, you are not immune from being laid off. Guaranteed pensions were replaced by defined contribution plans and then by 401(k)'s. Each move leading to more risk and less security for the middle class would be retiree.
In that atmosphere is it any wonder that people of the baby boomer generation and later are fearful and anxious? It is very easy for some people to conflate the two sea changes that have occurred for this generation, the unsettling and jarring shocks of our changing economy and workplace, with the more transparent and visible changes to the American melting pot.
It is an environment where certain people fall easy prey to those who will offer them easily identifiable scapegoats and simplistic answers. People recognize that things have changed in this country as it relates to their own personal economic well-being, and not in a good way. In that respect I am in agreement with the Tea Party baby boomers wanting their country back. The difference is recognizing the forces that have 'taken it away'.
It's so much easier to blame all the problems, and your feelings of anxiety and fear, on people different than you, even if logic tells you they have no real power, than it is to look at the policy and structural changes that have occurred and work with others to try and move the country in a different direction. Who is it easier to take on, rich Wall Street stockbrokers and bankers, or immigrants, single mothers, poor people and people with strange accents and a different skin color?
So yes Fox News and their ilk are all too ready to stoke the forces of fear and prejudice for their own aims. But it is also important to recognize the things that are leading to anxiety and fear of people of a certain age that makes them easy prey, if we have any chance of reaching and regaining those we have lost.